I can assure you that this project included more than 5 combined years of research. What this research revealed is that the history and trade of the southern frontier, greatly exceeds the understanding of most. The regional cultures were constantly in a state of change and were in fact a convergence of several European powers, a host of Native American cultures, many reaching into the Mississippian past, as demonstrated in the quill work of the medicine bag, and an intercourse of trade routes reaching from the Eastern Woodlands, the Great Lakes, caribbean islands and the trade companies of Europe.

If you wish to learn more, you simply need to contact the numerous artists that contributed to this exhibit or the owner of the collection.

They may have done research about SE designs, but they missed the whole part about the lack of quillwork in the southeast. Try reading Bartram, Adair, or any of the other prolific writers of the SE, who actually lived through it. You guys missed the boat by a long shot. Everyone who has been studying the Native southeast for any length of time knows this elementary stuff.

Nobody missed any boats, I think that we're just on a different landing than the one you expected.

Our quillworker on this project is an extremely gifted and creative artist. Her work is well researched and her methods are sound. I think that your critique is unfortunately based on the incorrect assumption that all of the quilled pieces in the Southern Traveler collection were intended to represent items which would have been made in the South. This was definitely not our intent.

The project represents a number of interwoven themes, one of which is the notion that our man probably traveled over a large area over long period of time. Judging by the pieces that he has left behind, we get a feel for the time frame and for the region where he may have spent much of his time. We may also recognize that not all of the items would have been made in the Southeast. While many of the pieces are intended to represent such, others represent pieces imported from Europe, and yet others represent domestically made pieces, but from locations other than in the Southeast. In traveling over a large area over what would may have been a number of years, our man would have come into contact with people from many different backgrounds who he might have traded with. The result is a richly diverse collection of items which hold clues as to their origins, their makers, possible chain of ownership... the possibilities are numerous.

Most of the pieces in the collection are not direct copies of existing work, but are of course inspired by such. Much effort was made by all those involved to use their knowledge of original work to create fresh, new pieces that, while previously "unseen", are firmly rooted in tradition, albeit in ways that some may not expect.

In working on and in presenting this project, we did not want to identify who our man was, nor explain our every intent. In part this was to allow the objects to "tell their own stories" and to allow for you and anybody else to "think into" what they were seeing and perhaps develop their own stories and questions about what they see. In a way, we hope to invoke the same feelings of wonder as when a new original piece is seen for the first time; we use our knowledge to try to sort out what we are looking at, and maybe also wonder about the stories this piece might possibly tell us.

Introduction

When Robert Weil started collecting images for the Contemporary Makers book in 1973 the challenge to record contemporary gun work was daunting. Gathering material was difficult and time consuming. Few makers thought that there was any value in published documentation of their work. Electronic publishing has changed all that. Having a website or having one's work available to view on the internet is becoming a necessity. In spite of all the potential to finally have a true overview of what's being produced by the artists of today, a great deal of work still remains covered up and basically unknown. Our role is to make an effort to document some portion of what’s going on today. To comment on the established makers and to uncover the unknown. We welcome your comments and suggestions and look to you our readers to make us aware of the talented makers out there.Art and Jan RiserRobert Weiland The Makers